Footy!

That sport with the black and white ball?  The US is not the only country in the world to call it "soccer", rather than "football".

In Australia, soccer is soccer.  And football is footy.  Or AFL, Jonathan calls it.  He has played it in PE at school.  Australian rules football. 

Yesterday, we went to an Australian rules football game at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds stadium, with seven friends and more than 70,000 others.

So what is football in Australia?

It is a game played on a circular field, with radius approximately 150 meters (so you can fit at least two US football fields in there).

Images from Wikipedia.

There are four goal posts on either end, for three different goal regions on each side.  Kick the ball through the center posts for six points.  Kick it to the side for one point.

You can carry the ball, but not far.  You have to bounce it if you want to keep running.

You can throw the ball to your teammates.  Like ultimate frisbee, but with bouncing and kicking.

You can kick the ball anytime.

If you catch the ball after it has been kicked, the other team has to step away and give you space to complete your play.  If you kick and a teammate catches near the goal posts, the crowd goes wild!  You're going to score!

If your teammate does not catch the ball, the game does not stop, or switch teams, but everyone gets to go chasing after it.

You can tackle in legal ways.  But not all tackling is legal.  Not quite sure which is which.  And every time the game stopped with players on top of each other, the crowd went crazy with angry shouting.  I think it's better to keep the ball moving.  And notice from the photos that no one wears helmets or padding.  Better not to get tackled.

Jonathan comes home indignant from school.  At recess, some of the children play footy with tackling, which is against school rules. 

Some other interesting rules.  If you have the ball, and you run out of bounds a little, just run back in and keep playing.

If the ball gets kicked or thrown or rolled out of bounds, then the referee takes it to the edge, faces backwards, and chucks he ball backwards as high over his head as possible.

Play starts when the referee bounces the ball in the center of the field as hard as he can. 

The referee wears bright green.

The players wear black and white vertical stripes.  Or brown and yellow stripes.  Those were the teams we watched.

The fans wear scarfs in their team colors.  Because it is winter.  Just wearing a guernsey (jersey) like one of the players won't do, because you will have to put a coat over it.  The players do not put coats over their guernseys, but they are running back and forth around a giant circular field without any stopping for tackling or hiking or kickoffs.

Here, a scarf tells the world which team you support.

You do not root for a team.  That is obscene.  You support a team.  Be very careful with that one.

Finally, here are a couple of pictures that we took.  The first is our Australian friend Andrew explaining the game to Jonathan.  The second is our view of the field.  Go team!